Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Showing Flower Love: Making your own Floral Hair Accessory!

Makes me long for warm and sunny days!

I'm ready for Spring to be in the air, for nature to wake up, and flowers to bloom! I adore flowers and nothing perks up a great vintage hairstyle better than a great flower. There are a lot of great places to buy floral hair accessories from, but sometimes they don't have exactly what I'm looking for, plus often times it's more fun to make it yourself! It's such a fun little project I wanted to share it with you guys, so I've created a step-by-step with some great pictures (ok some are great...some are a little fuzzy, but you all will be happy to know I found my missing tripod so the picture process should be getting easier soon).

What you Need.

Duck Billed Clips

Shop around for some great silk flowers from your local hobby/craft store (there's some great deals out there, Joanne has most of theirs on sale for 50% off)

Wire cutter (you don't want to cut the steams off with scissors since it will dull them pretty quickly)

Scissors

Duck billed clips (not sure what exactly these are called so I included a picture, plus I like the way the shot turned out)

Hot glue gun and glue sticks (I used all-purpose glue sticks)

Felt (works well as it doesn't absorb glue like a lot of other fabrics do)

Let's get Crafting!

Step 1: Clip the steam off, as close to the flower as you can

Step 2: If there is a plastic cap on the back of the flower you'll want to remove that by gently peeling it off, it will glue on better without the plastic and snip off any steam nub that remains.

Steps 1 (plastic cap visible here)

Step 3: Cut out a piece of felt approximately the same size as the top of your duck billed clip

Step 4: Place glue along the lengthwise edges of the felt and place on top of clip, hold in place while glue cools - careful this can be hot (also open up the clip so that you don't accidentally glue it together)

Step 4 - Completed

Step 5 (Optional): The flowers might look really cute with leaves as an added touch! The leaves will come with plastic on the backside, which you will want to remove by peeling off. Once that's done you'll just need to glue the leaves to the back of the flower, be sure to hold in place while the glue dries.

Step 5 - Removing the plastic

Step 6: Spread glue on the felt on the duck billed clip then place the clip on the back of the flower, try to avoid placing it directly on the lump as it will not anchor as well, and hold in place to dry.

Step 7: Ta-da!!! Your first custom made flower hair accessory. Now go plan the perfect hairstyle to best show off your new creation.

This blog is now going to be updated 4 times per week instead of daily, it's so much fun but some other projects are falling behind...if only that full-time job wasn't so, well, full-time! Next post will probably be Saturday or Sunday, but until then feel free to leave a comment! We love comments!

What craft projects are you most proud of? If you make your own let me know how it went!